Archive for the ‘Sports Car Services’ tag

Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car readers are by now familiar with David Clark at Sports Car Service in Westminster, Vermont, a shop that specializes in LBCs of all sorts. For the latest episode of Hemmings TV, we sent videographer Don Ashley up to visit David and find out how such a specialist made his way up to a barn surrounded by cows.

I was happy to enlist the help of the capable and gregarious David Clark, proprietor of Sports Car Services; I accompanied him on a roundabout tour of the Northeast one Saturday last November as he dropped off one MGB to a customer in New Jersey and picked up my recalcitrant M.G. before paying a visit to gearbox specialist John Esposito of Quantum Mechanics Ltd. We brought Blaze back to David’s shop, where he replaced the offending starter solenoid and got it running before parking it in his storage barn for the winter.

Because I only have a two-car garage (my ’91 Saab 900S sits outside, while the 1980 MGB Tourer and ’00 Volvo C70 HPT coupe receive preferential treatment), I left Blaze with David through the summer months. I had a few people who responded to my “For Sale” ads and made the trip to look at the car, but there were no takers. Instead of hogging David’s barn space for another winter, I decided to bring the car here and find local storage, which would give me the opportunity to rebuild the SU HIF 4 carburetors, something I’ve been wanting to do that will make the car more saleable this spring.

I was thankfully able to borrow one of Hemmings’ truck-and-trailer rigs for a few hours last Saturday morning. Dave LaChance accompanied me over the mountain to collect the car and transport it back.

I’ve since changed the oil, detailed it and given it some exercise, and I’ll be moving it into covered storage this weekend. The carburetors will then come off, and I’ll attempt to rebuild them with a kit from Joe Curto. Wish me luck!

Back in the June 2007 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car, we featured David Clark’s incredible, $50 MGB GT winter beater. Well, David just wrote to tell us that last winter was the MGB’s final winter; it’s just too rusty to drive.

(I’m assuming the appearance of the garbage truck was just a coincidence, but with David, you never know.) As the story mentioned, David, the proprietor of Sports Car Services in Westminster, Vermont, had another, nearly identical MGB GT in storage, ready for the passing of the torch. Its day has finally come.

Honk and wave if you see him on the road. It’ll probably be the only MGB-GT you’ll see on the roads of New England until April.